


The Initiation

by weakinteraction



Category: Sea of Souls
Genre: Alchemy, BDSM, F/M, Sex Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-28 23:40:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5109737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After "Rebound", Leah demands explanations of Christopher.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Initiation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shorina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shorina/gifts).



The many-named man sat hunched over his desk, quickly dashing off lines of dense mathematics. The calculations were ones he had done thousands of times before, but he felt the need to confirm them once more in the light of the events of last night. The computer, switched off on the side of the desk, could have completed them in microseconds. Ancient wisdom, modern technology; that was what he advocated. But he needed to know for certain, needed to understand how the new variables interacted.

The equations twisted from one line to the next, as he rearranged them from one form to another. But they would not simplify.

The videophone trilled, and he was almost glad of the excuse to turn away from the task, until he saw the face on the screen.

Leah.

The love of his life. And the biggest mistake he had ever made in all the long centuries.

The videophone trilled again. "Christopher, I know you're up there! Let me in or..."

She had already inadvertently summoned a demon to try to win him back. It might be best to put matters between them to rest more calmly than circumstances had allowed a few nights ago.

He pressed the switch to answer. "Leah," he said, suppressing the desire to smile. "Come up." He thumbed the other button that unlocked the door.

He wanted to run down the stairs to greet her, to hug and kiss her. He felt like a giddy schoolboy, young in a way that he had not been in reality for millennia. This was the way he had felt around her since he first saw her all those months ago. It was only centuries of self-control and mental discipline that allowed him to maintain the detachment he would need.

When she entered the room, however, he could not help himself jumping up from the desk and striding over to her. But when he tried to put his arms around her, she rebuffed him.

"Don't. I-- just don't, OK?"

He pulled back slightly, allowed the mask to drop back over his face. "Would you like to come and sit down?"

Leah nodded, and he took her over to the small seating area. She sat as far as she could to one end of the leather couch, seemingly avoiding meeting his eyes, fiddling nervously with the curls of her hair. For a moment he was overwhelmed by sense memory: how it felt tangled around his fingers as he kissed her, the taste of her lips, the warmth of her skin pressed against him.

Her gaze settled on the sword for a long time. Then she finally turned to him directly. "You owe me an explanation. Or maybe lots of explanations."

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I do." He took a deep breath. "Have you talked to Monaghan?"

"He thinks you're over a hundred years old," Leah said. "And French. You don't seem particularly French, if you don't mind my saying."

She looked at him, seemingly awaiting a response. "And do you believe him?" he asked in a measured tone.

She stared back. "There's a lot I'm not sure about about the other night, about everything. Sometimes I just think it must all have been a horrible nightmare. But I do remember you saying that I was the love of your life. And you can't have love without honesty. So if you love me at all, _be honest with me_. Are you a Frenchman who's old enough to be my great-great-grandfather?"

Very quietly, he said, "I'm not French. When I was born there was no such country as France."

Leah's mouth dropped open for a moment, but she quickly recovered herself.

"Monaghan told you that he believed that I was Fulcanelli, not just someone interested in his work?" Leah nodded. "It's true. I was. But I have been many other men, across the centuries."

"You're immortal?"

"I would rather say that I haven't died yet," he said.

"But you've been not-dying for hundreds--" She caught his look. "Thousands? Thousands of years." He nodded.

She looked dumbstruck. He decided to give her as long as she needed to process the idea.

"How?" she asked eventually. He started to try to work out how to explain that if he could just tell her, he would, but it was nowhere near as simple as that, without coming across as patronising. But then she clarified. "How can _I_ be the love of your life? I'm just some girl from Glasgow!"

"Leah," he said, reaching out to put his hand on her knee. "You're not 'just' anything. Please, don't ever think that. But really, how could you _not_ be?"

"But in all those thousands-- thousands! of years, there's never been anyone?"

"I didn't say that," he said. "But... Let me try to explain." He stood up and walked to the window. After a moment, she followed and stood next to him. "What do you see?" he asked her.

"The city," she said. "Lights everywhere. Streetlights, headlights, lights in people's flats, lights left on in that office block."

"There are half a million people in this city," he tells her. "Half a million souls. And for the vast majority of them, all the serious relationships they will ever have will be with people who were born within ten miles of the same place that they were."

"So?"

He turned to her. "So does it really seem likely that, out of all the billions of people on the planet, your soulmate should be born so close by?"

"You sound like the people who say soulmates don't exist."

"That's the great tragedy," he said quietly. "They do, but they so rarely meet." He swept out an arm to encompass the twinkling lights of the cityscape. "Oh, I'm not saying those people out there don't love each other, they surely do. It's the capacity to love that makes the human soul ..." He caught up to himself in time to stop himself saying "worth saving"; it wasn't fair on Leah to tell her of the task ahead of him. "So special," he said eventually.

"But it must happen sometimes," Leah said. "If soulmates are real. The odds are astronomical, but across the world there are enough couples that some of them..."

"Indeed," he said. "Some of them live in quiet bliss. And some of them are the basis for all the stories people tell each other about what love can be."

"And you're saying... I _am_ your soulmate?"

He took her hand and pulled it towards his chest. "How did you feel when we first met? When you came for that interview?"

She took her hand out of his and laid it flat over his heart. "It was like being hit by lightning," she said. "I just... knew, right there and then, that I wanted to be with you. I didn't think I'd make it through the interview at all."

"Lightning, that's a wonderful way of putting it," he said. "I felt the same. And I'd never felt that way before. Not in all my long life."

"I suppose those astronomical odds of meeting your soulmate shorten when you're immortal," she said, trying to make it sound like a joke, but he could hear the earnest intent behind it.

"You're right, I was a fool," he said.

"Christopher, I didn't mean--"

"No, I was. I never predicted it! Never planned how to deal with it." He led her to the table where he had been working before she arrived. "I should have, I should have been able to--"

She ran a finger down the dense lines of mathematics. "You can predict the future through this?"

"The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics," he told her. "It's not as simple as prediction. But the general shape of what is possible, what is probable, can be derived."

"This is phi, isn't it?" she said, pointing to several occurrences of the symbol. "The golden ratio. Like this building. Like Fulcanelli talked about-- Like you talked about in your book about the cathedrals." The note of scepticism was still there in her voice, but fading. She wanted to believe the truth.

"Yes, the golden ratio."

She turned upwards from the pages of workings, put her hand to his cheek. "Monaghan told me, about the dedication of your book, about why he'd misunderstood. That you felt you had to give me up. Christopher... What do these equations show? What's coming, that you would turn your back on a love like ours, a love you just told me you'd never felt in thousands of years?"

He guided her into the chair and leaned over her shoulder, pointing out key parts of the mathematics as he spoke. "The golden ratio divides the whole into two, so that the smaller part is the same fraction of the larger part as the larger part is of the whole. If I'm right, human history is about to move through a change, from the larger part where only a few have seen the truth, to the smaller one where all shall know it. But there's a vast gulf between knowing and understanding. If people simply know, those other forces--"

"Like the..." Leah swallowed. "Like the demon?"

"They'll turn this world into a living hell. Everything I've done as Christopher Chambers has been directed towards helping everyone to truly understand."

She reached up and put her hand over the hand he was resting on her shoulder. "It sounds rather as though you're going to need some help."

* * *

He had quite deliberately not taken on any acolytes since assuming the Chambers identity. There had been only a few dozen, across all the long centuries, and while he had been able to bring them to understand some of the truth, none of them had been able to transcend death in the same way he had, and so he had always, eventually, found himself alone once more. And, with the point of crisis approaching, it had seemed foolish to suppose that helping any one individual understand was a worthwhile use of his time, in comparison to the work that lay ahead of safeguarding humanity's spiritual welfare.

Leah, though, was unlike any of his previous acolytes. She picked things up so quickly, so readily, as though she was born to it, which in a way, he supposed, she was. And yet she also constantly challenged him, unwilling to accept anything he told her at face value. She would be relentless if she caught him in any contradiction, no matter how small.

When they made love, though, she surrendered herself to him completely. She always had done, even in their previous dalliance. It was utterly intoxicating to him, and it was in this one area that he still held back: held back from seeing how deep their soulmate bond was, how far the acolyte would follow him. Each time they made love it became more and more like a little ritual; he did not dare make it into a grand one, not yet.

"What should I call you?" she asked him one night when the little ritual was over, drawing lazy lines up and down his chest with her finger.

He propped himself up on his elbows to be able to see her properly. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you're not really Christopher," she said.

"I am as much 'Christopher' as any other name," he told her. "It's the name you've always known me by."

"You don't have some other name you think of as your real name?" she asked.

"All the names are equally real," he said. "And equally unreal. In my innermost thoughts, I am simply ... me."

"I can't just call you 'you'," she complained.

"Call me Christopher," he said. "Honestly."

She bent upwards to his ear, and whispered into it, "I think I should call you 'Master'."

He turned to look at her. Her mouth was twisted in a playful expression but her eyes were shining with something more than desire.

"You are my master, aren't you?" she said. "In the alchemical sense. Just because we haven't called it that--"

"Much of the vocabulary is archaic," he responded. "I think if I were starting from scratch, I would use something closer to 'guide'. As I hope you're starting to realise, I can only help to show you the way. You are the one who must follow it."

"And if I do follow it, I can become immortal like you?"

"I've told you before--"

"You're not immortal, you just haven't died yet," Leah said. "Well, I want to not die too. And I want us to spend the rest of our long, long lives together." As she spoke, she slipped her hand further down his chest and across his belly, until her fingers were wrapped around his still semi-erect cock. "You've already taught me that understanding the higher mysteries doesn't make our desires go away, that our desires are even _part_ of the mysteries."

"Are you sure?"

"I know you desire this," she said. She started pumping her hand back and forth. "And I know that you know I desire it too."

"It could be ... dangerous," he said. "You're right, this is part of the mysteries. There is powerful magic."

"I know that you can handle powerful magic," she told him.

He took hold of her wrist and she released her grip on his cock instantly. In one movement, he pulled that hand up to the pillow and rolled her onto her back. He found her other hand and pinned it together with the first above her head, leaving his second hand free to push her legs apart.

"Yes, Master," she breathed.

He slid inside her and she yielded to him utterly. He released his grip on her hands but she kept them locked together in exactly the same place, just as he had known she would. He pushed himself up and settled into a slow, steady rhythm. He lost himself listening to the catch in her breath every time he thrust into her, the disappointed moan every time he slid backwards.

And then he could feel the veil lifting, the energies beginning to seep into them. This was what he had always taken care to avoid before when they made love. But he could sense now that this was not an irruption of the supernatural into the mortal realm, but the divine principles of the mortal realm itself made manifest in their lovemaking. This was an act of re-creation, making the world again, so that when they finished, her clenching tight around him as he thrust once more into her, the veil descended once more, stronger than it had been before.

She slept, and the earth slept with her, but he could not.

He slipped out of the bed quietly, padded to the desk and turned on the small lamp. Leah stirred, mumbled, but did not awake. He pulled pen and paper towards him and started once more to work through the equations he had abandoned that night she had come to him in his office. They were more complex now, on the face of it, but as he worked through them they began to simplify, and he saw what he had not been able to that night: that the solution required the addition of an extra term. An extra term that he saw now with certainty represented Leah, soulmate and acolyte both.

* * *

He took her to the beach. A cold, blustery day; her hair blew around wildly so that she kept having to fight with it to keep it out of her mouth when she spoke.

"Why are we here, Master?" She called him that whenever they were alone together now. It seemed to have accelerated everything. Openly acknowledging that aspect of their relationship ironically seemed to make her own progression along the paths of knowledge -- to the point where she would no longer be the acolyte to his master, but his equal -- more rapid. And then there was whatever it was that was happening when they made love. He could feel the ritual taking shape, even as he did not yet understand what it was for. He still did not understand everything about the energies that wanted to work through them, and that was exhilirating in and of itself.

"Look at the pebbles," he told her. She looked all around her, nonplussed but trusting him. "Which one is the most like a stone?"

"They're all stones," she said.

"Close your eyes," he said. She did so. "Imagine a stone," he told her. "Hold it in your mind: a stone. The Platonic ideal, if you will." He allowed himself a small laugh. "Now open your eyes. Which stone comes the closest to the image in your mind?"

Leah bent down and picked up one of the pebbles. "This one."

"Congratulations," he said. "You now have your very own Philosopher's Stone."

"What? No, you're talking rubbish. The Philosopher's Stone is the universal solvent, the thing that can break down anything. _Solve et coagula_ , all that sort of thing."

"How closely does that stone match the one you imagined?"

"Well, it's a bit knobblier on this side," she said.

He produced a small chisel and handed it to her. "So make it less knobbly."

He watched with pride as she sat down on a boulder and began to work at it. After a while, she held it up for him to look at. "Well?"

"You tell me," he said.

"It's closer," she said. "But it's still not perfect. Maybe--"

She picked up the chisel again, but he stopped her gently and took it back from her. "You'll have plenty of time. Forever, in fact."

"So the Philosopher's Stone is really about realising that a perfect, ideal stone doesn't exist? Can't exist?"

"Not quite," he said. "It's the process that's important. The ongoing process. That will be your stone, even when it has become invisibly small. And you will continue to work to make it closer to the stone in your head."

"Do you have one?"

"Of course," he said. "Though you cannot see it, and nor can I." He took a deep breath. "The Great Work, Leah."

"Turning lead into gold?"

"It can be," he said. "But the details don't matter. The true secret of the Great Work, whatever you choose it to be, is that it _is_ work; it is ongoing, and it is never finished, can never be finished. And while it is unfinished, a mind dedicated to completing it must go on. The greatest mystery of the cathedral is that it is always being rebuilt. Creation must be re-created, made anew all the time."

And that was it: the moment that she learned the greatest truth was the same moment that he realised what they were destined to do, what the energies that had been swirling around and surging through them seek to achieve. A complete refounding of the world. He had thought that his role was to guide humanity through the transition; how very, very poorly he had understood.

* * *

They met with Monaghan, in a small coffee shop. There was something delightfully prosaic about the experience, comfy chairs and china cups, as the numinous spread further and further into their everyday lives. He still hadn't been able to divine the exact date from his equations, but it must be soon.

Mostly, Monaghan seemed to want reassurance that Leah was not in any danger.

"I'm not just some girl from Glasgow any more," she told him. "I'm at the start of an amazing journey."

It wasn't entirely clear whether that convinced Monaghan or not, but he turned to other topics. "So are you ... learning alchemy?"

"I'm learning everything," she said.

"Alchemy was one way of understanding that worked for a few," he told Monaghan. "As was philosophy. But then came science ... I thought they had it, back at the start of the twentieth century. Quantum mechanics, relativity ... But they only opened the door by a hair's breadth. They never walked through it. But that hair's breadth was enough for the forces on the other side to try to come through."

"Nuclear weapons," Monaghan said, his voice like ashes.

"I tried to warn them ..." he said. He looked Monaghan directly in the eyes. "I've known that the tipping point is coming for a hundred years. And it will be _soon_ , now. One discipline or another -- neuroscience, artificial intelligence, maybe it would even have been parapsychology -- was going to blow that door off its hinges."

Monaghan picked him up on the word choice; of course he did. "'Would have been?' 'Was going to?'"

"I thought that was how it would be for the longest time," he explained. "That I was going to have to shepherd humanity to some sort of understanding of the new knowledge it had found. But that was before."

Monaghan took a sip of his coffee. "Before?"

"Before Leah," he said. "Before I realised what our role was truly supposed to be."

Leah smiled broadly at Monaghan. "We're going to do it rather differently."

* * *

He had built this tower thinking of it as a fortress against the forces of darkness, a last redoubt of the light. But all along it had been a beacon, waiting to be lit.

Leah lay on the table naked, ankles and wrists bound: the willing sacrifice. The eager sacrifice, he allowed himself to think as he noted the obvious signs of her arousal. They could have had a bed installed up here easily enough, and it would have made no difference to the ritual, but Leah had insisted that she wanted it this way.

He looked at the clock: midnight was approaching. Timing would be the most difficult part; they must climax together at the witching hour. His desire filled him and he knew that it would take all his many, many years of experience and self-discipline not to lose control.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes, Master."

He pressed the button on the remote control and the lights changed, projecting a circle around the table. Not for protection, this time, at least not their protection. From this circle would expand outwards the effects of their spell, until the whole planet was anchored by what they were about to do, no longer at the mercy of external forces. Their chymical wedding would have as its offspring a new Earth, indistinguishable from the old, but recreated from its own progeny: complete, self-consistent, and safe.

* * *

He stripped off the simple robe he had been wearing and entered the circle. He drank in the sight of her body for a long moment before bending down to kiss her.

"Are you sure about this?" he said. "It still isn't too late to back away."

"Don't ask me that again," Leah said. "It's what we have to do. You know that. You've felt it as well. You're the one who worked it all out."

"Only with your help," he said. "Teaching you, I saw what I could not thinking only for myself."

"And, Master, I _want_ this," she said. "I want to live at your side for four thousand years and never forget this night."

He kissed her again, and now he could feel the energies tugging at both of them, twisting around and through their bodies.

"I can feel it, Master ..."

* * *

The energy came from within: from within themselves, from within everything. Two principles, a unity of opposites. Two soulmates, exemplifying and embodying them, enabling them to work in the world.

Leah was earth, was humanity, and he was sun, moon and stars all together. He shone down upon her, but his light was meaningless without her there to see it. She brought forth life, but could not without him to provide the spark. He was a fire, and she burned, and in burning was reborn, phoenix from the ashes.

* * *

In the outer realms, the spirits and demons and eldritch abominations spat and cursed their rage, battered themselves against the doors that were swinging shut all around them. The realm that had been so deliciously vulnerable, so open to their depradations, for so long, was now cut off, had become its own, separate reality.

* * *

Like so many others that night, Monaghan dreamed, but did not remember his dream. He awoke with a sense of peace that he had never before known, but which would never leave him.

* * *

Leah gasped out "Yes, Master" each time he thrust into her, surrendering to him, to the ritual, to the neverending work.

* * *

The Earth was safe. Humanity was safe, to develop at its own pace.

* * *

Afterwards, they held on tightly to one another.

* * *

The energy dissipated, into everything.

* * *

_Solve et coagula._

* * *

Spiralling outwards.

* * *

One.

* * *

All.


End file.
